Jazz is a music genre that originated at the beginning of the 20th Century, arguably earlier, within the African-American communities of the Southern United States. Its roots lie in the combining by African-Americans of certain European harmony and form elements, with their existing African-based music. Its African musical basis is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swung note.From its early development until the present day, jazz has also incorporated elements from popular music especially, in its early days, from American popular music.
As the music has developed and spread around the world it has, since its early American beginnings, drawn on many different national, regional and local musical cultures, giving rise to many distinctive styles: New Orleans jazz dating from the early 1910s, big band swing, Kansas City jazz and Gypsy jazz from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s on down through Afro-Cuban jazz, West Coast jazz, ska jazz, cool jazz, Indo jazz,avant-garde jazz, soul jazz, modal jazz, chamber jazz, free jazz, Latin jazz in various forms, smooth jazz, jazz fusion and jazz rock, jazz funk, loft jazz, punk jazz, acid jazz,ethno jazz, jazz rap, cyber jazz, M-Base, nu jazz and other ways of playing the music.
Talking of swing, Louis Armstrong, one of the most famous musicians in jazz, said to Bing Crosby on the latter's radio show, "Ah, swing, well, we used to call it syncopation, then they called it ragtime, then blues, then jazz. Now, it's swing. White folks - yo'all sho is a mess!"
In a 1988 interview, trombonist J. J. Johnson said, "Jazz is restless. It won't stay put and it never will".
Definitions
Jazz spans a range of music from ragtime to the present day—a period of over 100 years—and has proved to be very difficult to define. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions—using the point of view of European music history or African music for example—but critic Joachim Berendt argues that its terms of reference and its definition should be broader.Berendt defines jazz as a "form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of the Negro with European music" and argues that it differs from European music in that jazz has a "special relationship to time defined as 'swing'", involves "a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role" and contains a "sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror the individuality of the performing jazz musician".
A broader definition that encompasses all of the radically different eras of jazz has been proposed by Travis Jackson: he states that it is music that includes qualities such as swing, improvising, group interaction, developing an 'individual voice', and being open to different musical possibilities. An overview of the discussion on definitions is provided by Krin Gabbard, who argues that "jazz is a construct" that, while artificial, still is useful to designate "a number of musics with enough in common to be understood as part of a coherent tradition". In contrast to the efforts of commentators and enthusiasts of certain types of jazz, who have argued for narrower definitions that exclude other types, the musicians themselves are often reluctant to define the music they play. Duke Ellington, one of jazz's most famous figures, summed up this perspective by saying, "It's all music".
Importance of improvisation
While jazz is considered difficult to define, improvisation is consistently regarded as being one of its key elements. The centrality of improvisation in jazz is attributed to its presence in influential earlier forms of music: the early blues, a form of folk music which arose in part from the work songs and field hollers of the African-American workers on plantations. These were commonly structured around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, but early blues was also highly improvisational. Although European classical music has been said to be a composer's medium in which the performer is sometimes granted discretion over interpretation, ornamentation and accompaniment, the performer's primary goal is to play a composition as it was written. In contrast, jazz is often characterized as the product of group creativity, interaction, and collaboration, that places varying degrees of value on the contributions of composer (if there is one) and performers.Summarizing the difference, pianist Earl Hines remarked in a 1975 film that,
when I was playing classical music I wouldn't dare get away from what I was reading. If you've noticed, all of the symphonic musicians, they have played some of those classical tunes for years but they wouldn't vary from one note—and every time they play they have to have the music. So that's why for some classical musicians, it's very difficult for them to try to learn how to play jazz.
In jazz, therefore, the skilled performer will interpret a tune in very individual ways, never playing the same composition exactly the same way twice. Depending upon the performer's mood and personal experience, interactions with other musicians, or even members of the audience, a jazz musician may alter melodies, harmonies or time signature at will. The importance of improvisation has led some critics to suggest that even Duke Ellington's music was not jazz, because it was arranged and orchestrated. On the other hand, the solo piano "transformative versions" of Ellington compositions by Earl Hines were described by Ben Ratliff, the New York Times jazz critic, as being "as good an example of the jazz process as anything out there".
The approach to improvisation has developed enormously over the history of the music. In early New Orleans and Dixieland jazz, performers took turns playing the melody, while others improvised countermelodies. By the swing era, big bands were coming to rely more on arranged music: arrangements were either written or learned by ear and memorized, while individual soloists would improvise within these arrangements. Later, in bebop the focus shifted back towards small groups and minimal arrangements; the melody (known as the "head") would be stated briefly at the start and end of a piece, but the core of the performance would be the series of improvisations. Later styles such as modal jazz abandoned the strict notion of a chord progression, allowing the individual musicians to improvise even more freely within the context of a given scale or mode. In many forms of jazz a soloist is often supported by a rhythm section that accompanies the soloist by playing chords and rhythms that outline the song structure and complement the soloist. In avant-garde and free jazz idioms, the separation of soloist and band is reduced, and there is license, or even a requirement, for the abandoning of chords, scales, and rhythmic meters.
Debates
Forms of jazz that are commercially oriented or influenced by popular music have been criticized since at least the emergence of bebop. According to Bruce Johnson, there has always been a "tension between jazz as a commercial music and an art form".Traditional jazz enthusiasts have dismissed bebop, free jazz, the 1970s jazz fusion era, and much else as periods of debasement of the music and betrayals of the tradition; the alternative viewpoint is that jazz is able to absorb and transform influences from diverse musical styles, and that, by avoiding the creation of 'norms', other newer, avant-garde forms of jazz will be free to emerge.
Another debate that gained a lot of attention at the birth of jazz was how it would affect the appearance of African-Americans, in particular, who were a part of it. To some African-Americans, jazz has highlighted their contribution to American society and helped bring attention to black history and culture, but for others, the music and term 'jazz' are reminders of "an oppressive and racist society and restrictions on their artistic visions".
Etymology
The origin of the word jazz has had wide spread interest—the American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Twentieth Century—which has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well documented. The word began [under various spellings] as West Coast slang around 1912, the meaning of which varied but did not refer to music. The use of the word in a musical context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Its first documented use in a musical context in New Orleans appears in a November 14, 1916 Times-Picayune article about "jas bands."
Race
Imamu Amiri Baraka argues that there is a distinct "white jazz" music genre expressive of whiteness. The first white jazz musicians appeared in the early 1920s in the Midwestern United States. Bix Beiderbecke was one of the most prominent white jazz musicians.
History
Origins
Blending African and European music sensibilities
By 1808 the Atlantic slave trade had brought almost half a million Sub-Saharan Africans to the United States. The slaves largely came from West Africa and the greater Congo River basin. They brought strong musical traditions with them.The rhythms had a counter-metric structure, and reflected African speech patterns. African music was largely functional, for work or ritual. The African traditions made use of a single-line melody and call-and-response pattern, but without the European concept of harmony.
Slave gatherings
Lavish festivals featuring African-based dances to drums were organized on Sundays at Place Congo, or Congo Square, in New Orleans until 1843. There are historical accounts of other music and dance gatherings elsewhere in the southern United States. Robert Palmer commented on percussive slave music:
Usually such music was associated with annual festivals, when the year's crop was harvested and several days were set aside for celebration. As late as 1861, a traveler in North Carolina saw dancers dressed in costumes that included horned headdresses and cow tails and heard music provided by a sheepskin-covered "gumbo box", apparently a frame drum; triangles and jawbones furnished the auxiliary percussion. There are quite a few [accounts] from the southeastern states and Louisiana dating from the period 1820–1850. Some of the earliest [Mississippi] Delta settlers came from the vicinity of New Orleans, where drumming was never actively discouraged for very long and homemade drums were used to accompany public dancing until the outbreak of the Civil War.
The Black church
Another influence came from black slaves who had learned the harmonic style of hymns of the church, and incorporated it into their own music as spirituals. The origins of the blues are undocumented, though they can be seen as the secular counterpart of the spirituals. However, as Gerhard Kubik points out, whereas the spirituals are homophonic, rural blues and early jazz "was largely based on concepts of heterophony."
Minstrel and salon music
In the early 19th century an increasing number of black musicians learned to play European instruments, particularly the violin, which they used to parody European dance music in their own cakewalk dances. In turn, European-American minstrel show performers in blackface popularized such music internationally, combining syncopation with European harmonic accompaniment. Paul Oliver has drawn attention to similarities in instruments, music and social function to the griots of Africa's western Sudanic belt. In the mid-1800s the white New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk adapted slave rhythms and melodies from Cuba and other Caribbean islands, into piano salon music. New Orleans was the main nexus between the Afro-Caribbean and African American cultures.
African rhythmic retention
In the opinion of jazz historian Ernest Borneman, what preceded New Orleans jazz before 1890 was "Afro-Latin music" similar to what was played in the Caribbean at the time. A fundamental rhythmic figure heard in Gottschalk's compositions such as "Souvenirs From Havana" (1859), many different slave musics of the Caribbean, as well as the bamboula, and other Afro-Caribbean folk dances performed in New Orleans Congo Square, is the three-stroke pattern known in Cuban music as tresillo. Tresillo is the most basic and by far, the most prevalent duple-pulse rhythmic cell in sub-Saharan African music traditions, and the music of the African Diaspora.
The "Black Codes" outlawed drumming by slaves. Therefore, unlike in Cuba, Haiti, and elsewhere in the Caribbean, African drumming traditions were not preserved in North America. African-based rhythmic patterns were retained in the United States in large part through "body rhythms" such as stomping, clapping, and patting juba. Robert Palmer states: "The patting, an ex-slave reported in 1853, 'is performed by striking the right shoulder with one hand, the left hand with the other—all while keeping time with the feet, and singing.'" African Americans also used everyday household items as percussion instruments. Anthropologist David Evans reported that black families in the hill country of northern Mississippi played polyrhythmic music in their homes on chairs, tin cans, and empty bottles.
Two decades after drumming was banned in Congo Square, in the post-Civil War period (after 1865), African Americans were able to obtain surplus military bass drums, snare drums and fifes. As a result, an original African American drum and fife music arose, featuring tresillo and related syncopated rhythmic figures. With this emerged a drumming tradition that was distinct from its Caribbean counterparts, expressing a uniquely African American sensibility. Evans states that among the older black drum and fife musicians of northern Mississippi, playing rhythm patterns that conform to proverbial phrases or the words of popular fife and drum tunes "is considered the sign of a good drummer." Palmer observes: "The snare and bass drummers played syncopated cross-rhythms," and speculates—"this tradition must have dated back to the latter half of the nineteenth century, and it could have not have developed in the first place if there hadn't been a reservoir of polyrhythmic sophistication in the culture it nurtured."
Tresillo is heard prominently in New Orleans second line music, and in other forms of popular music from that city from the turn of the twentieth century to present. Jazz historian Gunther Schuller commented on its retention in jazz: "by and large the simpler African rhythmic patterns survived in jazz ... because they could be adapted more readily to European rhythmic conceptions. Some survived, others were discarded as the Europeanization progressed."
"Spanish tinge"—the Afro-Cuban rhythmic influence
African American music began incorporating Afro-Cuban rhythmic motifs in the nineteenth century, when the habanera (Cuban contradanza) gained international popularity.Habaneras were widely available as sheet music. The habanera was the first written music to be rhythmically based on an African motif (1803). From the perspective of African American music, the habanera rhythm(also known as congo, tango-congo,or tango.) can be thought of as a combination of tresillo and the backbeat.
Musicians from Havana and New Orleans would take the twice-daily ferry between both cities to perform and not surprisingly, the habanera quickly took root in the musically fertile Crescent City. The habanera was the first of many Cuban music genres which enjoyed periods of popularity in the United States, and reinforced and inspired the use of tresillo-based rhythms in African American music.
John Storm Roberts states that the musical genre habanera, "reached the U.S. twenty years before the first rag was published." The piano piece "Ojos Criollos (Danse Cubaine)" (1860) by New Orleans native Louis Moreau Gottschalk, was influenced by the composer's studies in Cuba. The habanera rhythm is clearly heard in the left hand.With Gottschalk's symphonic work "A Night in the Tropics" (1859), we hear the tresillo variant cinquillo extensively. The figure was later used by Scott Joplin and other ragtime composers.
For the more than quarter-century in which the cakewalk, ragtime, and proto-jazz were forming and developing, the habanera was a consistent part of African American popular music.Comparing the music of New Orleans with the music of Cuba, Wynton Marsalis observes that tresillo is the New Orleans "clave", a Spanish word meaning 'code,' or 'key'—as in the key to a puzzle, or mystery.Although technically, the pattern is only half a clave, Marsalis makes the point that the single-celled figure is the guide-pattern of New Orleans music. Jelly Roll Morton called the rhythmic figure the Spanish tinge, and considered it an essential ingredient of jazz.
1920s and 1930s
The Jazz Age
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The Original Dixieland Jass Band performing "Jazz Me Blues", an example of a jazz piece from 1921.
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Prohibition in the United States(from 1920 to 1933) banned the sale of alcoholic drinks, resulting in illicit speakeasies becoming lively venues of the "Jazz Age", an era when popular music included current dance songs, novelty songs, and show tunes. Jazz started to get a reputation as being immoral and many members of the older generations saw it as threatening the old values in culture and promoting the new decadent values of the Roaring 20s. Professor Henry van Dyke of Princeton University wrote "... it is not music at all. It's merely an irritation of the nerves of hearing, a sensual teasing of the strings of physical passion."
Even the media began to denigrate jazz. The New York Times took stories and altered headlines to pick at jazz. For instance, villagers used pots and pans in Siberia to scare off bears, and the newspaper stated that it was jazz that scared the bears away. Another story claims that Jazz caused the death of a celebrated conductor. The actual cause of death was a fatal heart attack (natural cause).
Swing
The 1930s belonged to popular swing big bands, in which some virtuoso soloists became as famous as the band leaders. Key figures in developing the "big" jazz band included bandleaders and arrangers Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw.
Swing was also dance music. It was broadcast on the radio 'live' nightly across America for many years especially by Hines and his Grand Terrace Cafe Orchestra broadcasting coast-to-coast from Chicago, well placed for 'live' time-zones. Although it was a collective sound, swing also offered individual musicians a chance to 'solo' and improvise melodic, thematic solos which could at times be very complex and 'important' music.
Over time, social strictures regarding racial segregation began to relax in America: white bandleaders began to recruit black musicians and black bandleaders white ones.
In the mid-1930s, Benny Goodman hired pianist Teddy Wilson, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and guitarist Charlie Christian to join small groups. An early 1940s style known as "jumping the blues" or jump blues used small combos, uptempo music, and blues chord progressions. Jump blues drew on boogie-woogie from the 1930s. Kansas City Jazz in the 1930s as exemplified by tenor saxophonistLester Young marked the transition from big bands to the bebop influence of the 1940s.
Beginnings of European jazz
Outside of the United States the beginnings of a distinct European style of jazz emerged in France with the Quintette du Hot Club de France, which began in 1934. Belgian guitar virtuoso Django Reinhardt popularized gypsy jazz, a mix of 1930s American swing, French dance hall "musette" and Eastern European folk with a languid, seductive feel. The main instruments are steel stringed guitar, violin, and double bass. Solos pass from one player to another as the guitar and bass play the role of the rhythm section. Some music researchers hold that it was Philadelphia's Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti who pioneered the guitar-violin partnership typical of the genre,which was brought to France after they had been heard live or on Okeh Records in the late 1920s.
1940s and 1950s
"American music"—the influence of Ellington
By the 1940s, Duke Ellington's music transcended the bounds of swing, bridging jazz and art music in a natural synthesis. Ellington called his music "American Music" rather than jazz, and liked to describe those who impressed him as "beyond category." These included many of the musicians who were members of his orchestra, some of whom are considered among the best in jazz in their own right, but it was Ellington who melded them into one of the most well-known jazz orchestral units in the history of jazz. He often composed specifically for the style and skills of these individuals, such as "Jeep's Blues" for Johnny Hodges, "Concerto for Cootie" for Cootie Williams, which later became "Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me" with Bob Russell's lyrics, and "The Mooche" for Tricky Sam Nanton and Bubber Miley. He also recorded songs written by his bandsmen, such as Juan Tizol's "Caravan" and "Perdido" which brought the "Spanish Tinge" to big-band jazz. Several members of the orchestra remained there for several decades. The band reached a creative peak in the early 1940s, when Ellington and a small hand-picked group of his composers and arrangers wrote for an orchestra of distinctive voices who displayed tremendous creativity.
Jazz fusion
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the hybrid form of jazz-rock fusion was developed by combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments and the highly amplified stage sound of rock musicians such as Jimi Hendrix. Jazz fusion music often uses mixed meters, odd time signatures, syncopation, complex chords and harmonies. All Music Guide states that "until around 1967, the worlds of jazz and rock were nearly completely separate. [However, ...] as rock became more creative and its musicianship improved, and as some in the jazz world became bored with hard bop and did not want to play strictly avant-garde music, the two different idioms began to trade ideas and occasionally combine forces."
Miles Davis' new directions
In 1969 Davis fully embraced the electric instrument approach to jazz with In a Silent Way, which can be considered his first fusion album. Composed of two side-long suites edited heavily by producer Teo Macero, this quiet, static album would be equally influential upon the development of ambient music. As Davis recalls: "The music I was really listening to in 1968 was James Brown, the great guitar player Jimi Hendrix, and a new group who had just come out with a hit record, "Dance to the Music," Sly and the Family Stone... I wanted to make it more like rock. When we recorded In a Silent Way I just threw out all the chord sheets and told everyone to play off of that." Two contributors to In a Silent Way also joined organist Larry Young to create one of the early acclaimed fusion albums: Emergency! by The Tony Williams Lifetime.
Psychedelic-jazz
Bitches Brew
Davis's Bitches Brew (1970) was his most successful of this era. Although inspired by rock and funk, Davis's fusion creations were original, and brought about a type of new avant-garde, electronic, psychedelic-jazz, as far from pop music as any other Davis work.
Herbie Hancock
Davis alumnus, pianist Herbie Hancock, released four albums of the short-lived (1970–1973) psychedelic-jazz sub-genre: Mwandishi(1972), Crossings (1973), and Sextant (1973). The rhythmic background was a mix of rock, funk, and African-type textures.
Musicians who worked with Davis formed the four most influential fusion groups: Weather Report and Mahavishnu Orchestra emerged in 1971 and were soon followed by Return to Forever and The Headhunters.
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